New CNU athletic director Brooks aims for greater heights

His desk and office in Christopher Newport’s Freeman Center were mostly bare, and Todd Brooks joked that he should join the kids touring campus in the midst of freshman orientation.

The learning curve is steep for CNU’s new athletic director, but he is a willing and able climber who seems to be more encouraged and energized with each passing day.

“My first week-and-a-half, I’ve really done nothing but reiterate the fact that this is a wonderful institution with tremendous success, a strong commitment from the administration, beautiful facilities,” Brooks said. “As long as I’m able to work hard and give them what they want, I think the sky’s the limit. What a great place to be.”

Brooks is just the third athletic director in CNU history — fourth, if you count interim AD Jon Waters, who steered the department following the departure and then untimely passing of school and Peninsula icon C.J. Woollum earlier this year.

Brooks came to CNU after 16 years as coach and later full-time athletic director at Berry College, a private, liberal-arts school located on a massive, 27,000-acre campus in northwest Georgia that he had come to consider home.

He wasn’t looking to leave, but was first intrigued by and ultimately attracted to the vibrancy and ascent of Christopher Newport.

“I don’t know that I’ve seen as much growth and as much transformation with any other institution to the extent that CNU has,” he said. “I’m a guy that’s kind of motivated by that.”

Brooks tackled many of the same issues at Berry that CNU has confronted in the past 15 years: fund-raising and facilities upgrades; adding sports and conference affiliation.

He also successfully navigated the athletic department from NAIA to NCAA Division III membership, completing the four-year transition process just as he left Berry to begin at CNU.

“Todd has an impressive array of experiences,” said CNU president Paul Trible, the driving force in the school’s expansion in his 17-plus years on Shoe Lane. “He led programs at a fine liberal-arts college that shares similar academic and athletic philosophies, and we’ve talked about that. He’s built programs. He’s managed coaches and athletic teams. He has been a successful fund-raiser. Those are all experiences that should continue here.”

Friends and former colleagues describe Brooks as a man who is engaging and fair, who wears easily and is secure enough in his own abilities that he allows those around him to exhibit theirs. He attempts to build relationships with his coaches and throughout the department. He shares Trible’s vision for integrating the athletic and academic parts of campus.

“Todd is easily the best boss that I’ve ever had the privilege of working for,” said Berry senior women’s administrator and volleyball coach Mika Robinson, who has known him for five years.

“He is extremely organized and professional, yet he’s also very personable. He’s a man of integrity and great character. There was never any question that he would work to the best of his ability and lead us in the right direction.”

“I told people at CNU: If you can’t be successful under Todd, you can’t be successful,” said longtime Berry baseball coach David Beasley.

Brooks has done an immersion study since he arrived on the Peninsula a little more than three weeks ago. He described a recent speaking engagement at the Peninsula Sports Club as a kind of two-way street. He went there to learn as much about CNU, its history and tradition, as club members learned about the Captains’ new athletic director.

“I really feel fortunate to be able to try to fill the shoes of someone like C.J. Woollum,” Brooks said he told club members. “I hope that I can effectively and efficiently run this program even half as well as he did. That being said, I think we will continue to find ways to push this program over.

“It’s right there, as far as being a pre-eminent program in the nation in Division III. They’ve been ultra-successful, but when do we start churning those championships out? We want to continue to strategize to the point where we can create avenues where we can be that much more successful.”

Brooks takes over a CNU athletic program that finished 29th in the nation in the 2012-13 Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup Division III standings, which measure overall athletic excellence. The Captains were the top-rated USA South program in their final year in the league, as they move to the Capital Athletic Conference.

“In my opinion, you won’t see a lot of significant changes right off the bat because CNU is in such a good place,” Brooks said. “What I want to do in my first year is really work with those that are here, get a good feel for what’s here and (evaluate) the needs for coaches.

“My philosophy is, I’m not here to tell them how to coach. I’m not here to tell them who to play and who not to play. I’m here to say, what barriers can I break down, what hurdles can we knock over to get beyond Final Four participation and become the NCAA national champion.”

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Robert Todd Brooks, 48, is the second of Bob and Marlene Brooks’ four sons. He grew up in Anderson, Ind., where his dad was a high school principal and later assistant superintendent for the local school district. His mother was a homemaker who worked part-time when he was a youngster.

He is a basketball junkie who grew up during a golden age of Hoosier hoops, watching Bob Knight, Gene Keady and Digger Phelps roam the sidelines of the state’s premier college programs. He was a role player on his teams at Anderson High, which had one of the nation’s largest high school gyms, the 9,000-seat Wigwam. He earned a scholarship to play at Milligan (Tenn.) College, where he also was a willing, diligent role player.

“I used to say when I got into coaching,” Brooks said, “that was something that was going to help me because I felt like I understood what it took to work harder than others, because it didn’t come easy to me. I had to work at it, just like I had to work at my studies.”

Brooks speaks quickly, his words sometimes colliding at the ends of sentences as he speeds to the next thought. His cadence has the hint of a southern accent, likely acquired from 30 years of living in Tennessee and Georgia.

Brooks played for three coaches in high school and three more at Milligan, a total of six coaches in eight years. Still, he was passionate about basketball and determined to coach.

“I always felt like I was pretty much primed to coach basketball,” he said, “because I’d seen so many different philosophies, so many different approaches, things that did work, things that didn’t work. I think that really suited me well. It was a long process, trying to play for that many coaches.”

Brooks coached at Tusculum College, where he also was Dean of Students from 1990-93. He was AD and basketball coach at Piedmont (Ga.) College from 1993-97, then went to Berry as basketball coach. He was named athletic director a year later and continued to coach the basketball team until 2002, after which he became full-time AD.

Among his primary influences were his basketball coach his senior year at Anderson, Jerome Foley, and Tusculum president Robert Knott. Foley was a disciplinarian with a nurturing side who took him to basketball camps at Miami of Ohio, where he listened to college coaches swap stories and compare strategies, fueling his desire to work in athletics.

Knott saw administrative potential in a young assistant basketball coach and mentored him to become Dean of Students. That experience helped him land the Piedmont and Berry jobs.

Along the way, Brooks’ dream of becoming a Division I basketball head coach waned. He grew to enjoy the interaction and influence he had with students and athletes at smaller schools.

“I still like to be around them in practice,” he said, “I still like to be around them in competition. I like to travel with them every once in a while, just to see how they are. I think one of the most rewarding things I find in this position is getting to know young people, by name, and be able to talk to them.”

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Much like what’s taken place at CNU, Brooks oversaw massive growth in Berry athletics during his tenure. Berry added women’s golf, women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s lacrosse, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, and softball. Berry’s football team will play its first game this fall.

Facilities at Berry improved as well, notably a $32.5-million athletics and recreation complex that’s home to basketball, volleyball, swimming and diving, and student recreation. The school is in the midst of a fund-raising program for an on-campus football stadium.

Brooks was often the point man for department endeavors, but delegated easily to those around him.

“I never really thought of Todd as my boss,” said Beasley, who also is an assistant athletic director and fund-raiser. “He was more my partner than my boss, as far as what we were doing on the baseball field or in administration. I guess that’s part of being an effective leader, is that everybody feels like they’re invested.

“He was my boss, he was my athletic director and I totally understand that. But at no point in time did I ever walk around with Todd thinking, ‘Oh, lord, I’m here with my boss; I’ve got to be on my p’s and q’s.’ He would want you to be yourself and bring what you do to the table and pretty much just work to get the job done.”

The most daunting and time-consuming endeavor was the athletic department’s move from the NAIA to NCAA Division III. That move required a four-year transition period of intense scrutiny and record-keeping to prove that Berry was capable of complying with NCAA standards.

“I think that’s probably benefited him more than anything that could have happened,” said Jay Gardiner, commissioner of the Southern Athletic Association, of which Berry is a member, and a former AD at Oglethorpe.

“I would argue that from all our athletic directors’ vantage points, all of us having been in the NCAA for so long, he probably knows more about the NCAA, going from provisional status to full status,” Gardiner said. “Because of that, I think it’s helped him to become an even better athletic director at the Division III level. He really understands the NCAA and its workings and what their expectations are.”

Besides the added scrutiny and paperwork involved with the move to the NCAA, Berry’s teams were prohibited from postseason competition during the four-year transition period, which hurt recruiting and provided its own challenges.

“People weren’t jumping off the ship,” Robinson said, “and I think a large part of that was due to the fact that Todd was steering the ship.”

Brooks said that he could have seen himself retiring at Berry. But timing and circumstances led him elsewhere. He and his staff were putting the finishing touches on several projects, and the CNU opening came across his radar.

As he researched the job and the school, one resource was Berry assistant volleyball coach Caitlyn Jansen, a 2011 CNU grad and former USA South Player of the Year. He said that her affection for the school further piqued his interest.

Trible said that during the vetting process, he received a phone call from Berry president Stephen Briggs, who told him of conversations that he had with Brooks about various job opportunities.

Briggs was the former provost at the College of New Jersey, a nationally respected small, liberal-arts school, and he had followed CNU’s academic and athletic arc. He said he told Brooks that, unlike other openings, CNU’s was a position he should pursue because he believed it to be an ideal fit. Briggs went on to praise Brooks profusely.

“I’ve never gotten a phone call like that,” Trible said.

When Brooks visited CNU for an interview in March, he was blown away by the campus, facilities and commitment toward excellence. His descriptions to family and friends, he said, don’t do the school justice.

“What’s impressive to me,” he said, “is that it’s a state university with a private, liberal-arts feel. More important, Berry is a strong academic school, but CNU’s academic numbers are close, so it’s not lip service they’re paying to academics. They’re not just bringing in bodies to be successful, they’re bringing in student-athletes. That was part of the perfect fit for me.”

So perfect, in fact, that Brooks and his family will split for the coming year. His wife, Laura, will remain in Georgia and fulfill a teaching obligation tied to a subsidy that paid for her schooling. Their oldest son will live with Todd on the Peninsula, while their younger son will remain with Mom in Georgia.

It’s hardly an ideal arrangement, but Brooks figured that the new job and all it entails would prevent him from leading a normal family life, anyway. A year from now, he hopes to have established a routine that will make it comfortable when the entire family rejoins him here.

Though there are a hundred things to address — coaches to meet, procedures to learn, schedules to confirm — he cannot wait to get to all of them.

“What’s nice is I’m not here by myself,” Brooks said. “I’m telling you, there’s some good, strong administrators already here on board. I feel blessed just to be here and be able to work with them, but I definitely think I bring some things to the table that will be beneficial to CNU, and what’s nice is to be able to get into a situation where you have people whose skill sets are strong in other areas. In just a week-and-a-half, I’m seeing the signs of a really strong administrative team that I think will benefit CNU for years to come.”